Life at Exascale

The fastest supercomputers in the world today solve problems at the petascale—that is a quadrillion (1015) calculations each second.

While these petascale systems are quite powerful, the next milestone in computing achievement is the exascale—a higher level of performance in computing that will have profound impacts on everyday life.

At a quintillion (1018) calculations each second, exascale supercomputers will more realistically simulate the processes involved in precision medicine, regional climate, additive manufacturing, the conversion of plants to biofuels, the relationship between energy and water use, the unseen physics in materials discovery and design, the fundamental forces of the universe, and much more.

“Computational power is a vitally important tool that enables scientific discovery and assists us in finding solutions to some of our most difficult problems. The quest to achieve capable exascale computing is a quintessential technological challenge that will serve to enable a new generation of insights into such discoveries and solutions.” — Stephen Lee, ECP Deputy Director

Exascale: the Engine of Discovery

Exascale computing will have a profound impact on everyday life in the coming decades. At 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 operations per second, exascale supercomputers will be able to quickly analyze massive volumes of data and more realistically simulate the complex processes and relationships behind many of the fundamental forces of the universe.

This will have practical applications in everything from precision medicine to regional climate, water use to materials science, nuclear physics to national security. Exascale computing has the potential to drive discoveries across the spectrum of scientific fields—and to improve both our understanding of the world and how we live in it.

Learn more about the promise of Exascale and the collaborative efforts of government, academia and industry to lead the way into this new era of computing.

Latest News and Information

05/17/18
ECP’s Training and Productivity program delivers a robust developer training for ECP project members and the broader HPC community, including industry’s computing staff members, so they will be able to take full advantage of exascale hardware and software.

05/17/18
ECP’s Software Technology (ST) research focus area is working on several elements of its Software Development Kit initiative and preparing for the coordinated release of ST products for Q1FY19. Those are two of the topics ST Director Michael Heroux discusses in an audio update.

05/17/18
The status of the testing of ECP applications on the Summit system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the success and impact of the co-design centers are among the subjects of an audio update from Andrew Siegel, director of ECP’s Application Development research focus area.